--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
It is true that Wikinews is reaching the limits of
human scaling. This is
because we're getting so large that we will soon have to stop listing all
stories on the Main Page, and will have to use separate index pages
instead.
Yep. Such as pages devoted to news in particular nations. We could register
wikinews.us, for example, and redirect it to the U.S. news page on the English
Wikinews. If and when other Wikinews' U.S. news pages get busy enough, then we
could have xx.wikinews.us redirects as well. But wikinews.us by itself should
still auto redirect to the English version (and wikinews.ru should always
prefer the Russian Wikinews even if other xx.wikinews.ru redirects exist, ect
for each nation/primary language spoken in that nation).
Since I'm the person Gerard spoke about who is
going to implement
structured data functionality over the next 3-4 months, my own resources
are limited. However, I have offered in the past to act as a development
task coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation, and that offer still
stands.
For what it is worth you have my support. :)
Such a task coordinator would prioritize tasks,
maintain contacts to
potentially interested sponsors, and make recommendations on spending a
certain part of our internal budget on development tasks. He would write
the basic specifications, try to locate interested developers (both by
inviting them directly, and by having public calls for tenders), watch
over the implementation, and decide whether it meets the specs (together
with the Board and the MediaWiki Release Manager, Brion Vibber).
Sounds more like a Chief Technical Officer to me. If we can't pay you to do
this, then you might as well have a nice title to put on your resume. :) That
would not prevent us from finding a way to pay you in the future for this (if
the board so wishes), nor should it prevent you from working on and getting
paid for development tasks approved by the board in the interim.
I strongly believe that a combined model of full-time
employment for
people like Brion, and task-based contracts for project-specific needs, is
the only way forward.
Nod. We certainly have enough money for a couple full time employees and a few
limited term mini contract positions without putting a significant dent in the
overall budget. Whether or not the board wants to do that is a policy matter
for them to decide.
As for the specific needs Wikinews has, Ilya has
already written a bit
about that. I have a fairly good idea in my head how news feeds could work
within MediaWiki in a scalable fashion. The question is, are we willing to
spend the money to get this done?
We have $20,000 budgeted for development projects and/or extra hardware this
quarter.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
What we need is somebody to coordinate spending priorities and have that
approved by the board. A good deal of justification will be needed to spend
money on anything other than hardware so this is not a trivial task.
Just because Wikipedia sort of works (even though we
still don't have peer
review functionality after more than 4 years), we shouldn't start
slacking. We have half a dozen active developers at any given time. We
have hundreds of thousands of users and even more readers. We've tried
recruiting. Jimbo has given his speech at FOSDEM. There's more we can do,
but in part due to the growing complexity of MediaWiki, this imbalance can
ultimately only be addressed with one resource: money.
I've also noticed some fairly obvious vandalism slipping through for days
before being corrected. Our old way of RC patrol is not scaling well by not
letting different users divide the workload.
If I trust a set of users, then why would I need to check a diff they already
checked? And why would their edits show up just as prominently as people I
don't know/trust? Right now there is no way for me to know that somebody I
trust (or trust by proxy) has checked any particular diff. So I either check it
again or miss it in the flood of 20 to 30 edits a minute we get on the English
Wikipedia.
-- mav
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